A Review of Cynthia Ozick’s

When writing a novel in the first
person, an author with such fierce intelligence and power as Cynthia Ozick is
forced to funnel her enormous lexicon into the limited tones of some necessarily smaller
voice. Ozick has always been fascinated with impersonation and imposture,
though, and in her latest novel, Heir to the Glimmering World, her
ventriloquism act finds itself bound within a tiny doll-house theater that the
author’s near-omniscience constructs from far-ranging material but that, from
within he narrator’s small glimmer of life and reading, makes for tricky
circumscription.

On
its surface, this novel of the American 1930s is a tribute to the great English
authors of the 19th century, but as Ozick speaks through the voice of her
Brontëan orphan-protagonist Rose Meadows, it soon seems to be more like a
reflection of the 20th century’s own reflections of 19th century
style—particularly of John Updike’s and Saul Bellow’s conservative return to the
big-old-fashioned-novel aesthetic. There are rule-breaking twists, however, as
Rose’s narrative of her life-education with the German refugee clan the
Mitwissers drifts out of the box of her own mental arena (the same way that
Jane Austen sometimes breaks the strict logic of who’s saying or thinking what)
and then diverges into the separate chapters that follow the perversely
parallel non-education of the Mitwissers’ dissolute benefactor James A’Bair.
These forays are the novel’s most inspired moments, but at the same time, I
can’t help but think of Thomas Pynchon’s similar and more successful detours in
his parodic Mason & Dixon.

Perhaps
there are too many novels at play in this novel to allow it to cohere on its
own, or perhaps Ozick’s muted voice is unable to rise in a way that lifts her
vast learning into one living and all-encompassing entity. In the end, Heir
to the Glimmering World is like a brilliant Frankenstein’s monster that
can’t help but be an impersonation.